Fat Tony

“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster,” says Henry Hill, the lead character in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), as he participates in the roadside murder of a man in the boot of his car. The music begins and Tony Bennett, the king of lounge jazz, chimes in with his 1953 hit “Rags to Riches”, tunefully harmonising the primordial relationship between crime and capitalism. It seems that the same voracity in the pursuit of profit and laxity in adherence to the law is articulated in every significant American art form. Softly murmured in the poetry of gangsta rap or howled by the wolves of Wall Street, represented on TV by The Wire or The Sopranos, or on your Playstation in Grand Theft Auto, the pursuit of the American Dream 2.0 reflexively contains law-breaking.

It’s an aspect of American culture that was immortalised by the Godfather trilogy (1972-1990) in which Francis Ford Coppola draws many parallels between organised crime and American business. The victims of the mobsters are often told that their predicament is just “business” before they are shot in the face, and the term “family business” is, of course, synonymous with organised crime. This also echoes the nature of America’s imperial project as an extension of its particularly muscular form of capitalism.

Coppola also explicitly shows how the mob was integral to the US empire, with the section of the film set in Cuba where a united conglomeration of mobsters act like yet another US cooperation opening up new markets, sharing the language and mannerisms of the boardroom. When the mafia factions of the Corleone family see themselves as a reflection of the Roman Empire and refer to their operatives as “soldiers”, it makes sense that their commander is a World War II veteran. Their criminal enterprise mirrors the ravenous expansionism of US capital and the necessity of an empire to facilitate it.

Likewise, the Vietnam War’s shadow looms large over the Godfather films, as Americans attempted to process the trauma of that war. Coppola would go on to direct Apocalypse Now (1979), transposing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) from the Belgian Congo to Vietnam. Hollywood consistently shifts the horror from the legitimacy of war itself to the manner of its conduct. No context or explanation for the need for military intervention is offered, rather the film instead concerns itself with the twin narratives of good soldiers gone rogue and the inherent darkness of the land and its people. Conrad’s structural racism is transmuted into Coppola’s structural imperialism.

Other celebrated films, like Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) similarly doubled down on this sleight of hand, condemning the Vietnamese twice – first to death by raining Napalm, then to moral condemnation for the audacity to resist. The moral centres of these films are not the land that is invaded or the people who are killed – upwards of three million people between 1954 and 1975 – but the suffering of the working-class homeboys conscripted to do the killing. There is a depressing resonance with Israeli soldiers suffering PTSD after their genocidal sojourns in Gaza, a longstanding tradition of shooting while crying, victimising while self-identifying as the victim. Coppola is a natural East Coast progressive yet his film’s heroes embody the conservative values and concerns of middle America that eventually led to the revisionist hard-right presidency of Ronald Reagan and his political campaign, the first to use the now familiar slogan, “Make America Great Again”.

As we go to press, Donald Trump has been inaugurated as president for the second time. Even the most ardent admirers of Trump don’t think he is exceptionally good at anything, even being a real estate developer. Rather, the main quality they valorise in him are his badass ways. Instead of hiding his crimes, he is leaning into them, amplifying his image as a hardman.

The official portrait of the new president distributed by the White House bears more than a passing resemblance to a mugshot taken when he was charged for felonies in 2024. The traditional photographic mode for such an official image has always been a gentle medium close-up, like a school photo, featuring a soft lighting, in an office setting, perhaps with a desk  garnished with stars and stripes. The style of this new portrait is that of the police photographer, whose job is never to flatter the sitter. Trump offers a returning gaze that expresses barely concealed contempt and the pouting of a popstar.

The new administration has already attracted a court of oligarchs, led by Elon Musk, nicknamed the “Broligarchy”, who are doing their best to resemble and reflect Trump’s mob-boss energy. All the leading tech platform CEOs and owners donated to the costs of the inauguration. Elon Musk had already spent $200 million of his own money on the Trump campaign and even tried direct voter manipulation in the form of a lottery. Mark Zuckerberg, who had backed the Democratic party candidates in previous elections, sat this one out and was busy acquiring a new macho energy, claiming in an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan that he had started hunting with a bow and arrow (although he seemed to flounder when Rogan asked him about the kind of bow he was using). He also ditched all moderation on Facebook shortly before the inauguration, a craven gesture towards the new administration. Jeff Bezos has been pumping iron for a few years, earning himself the tight white T-shirts and swapping his former writer wife for one that looks more suitably like a playmate, while preventing the Washington Post (which he acquired in 2013 claiming to want to protect its brand of journalism) from calling in favour of a presidential candidate for the first time in 30 years, or printing cartoons that mock Trump and his new tech buddies.

Within days of assuming office Trump issued a flurry of executive orders, which include the closing of the borders and the rapid deportation of illegal immigrants and undocumented workers, as well as a promise to impose tariffs to pressure trading partners including Mexico, Canada and, of course, China. As a pillar of his policy to curtail China’s ability to compete in key technologies and hot on the heels of banning TikTok, Trump announced an investment plan worth up to $500 billion for infrastructure tied to artificial intelligence through a new partnership formed by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank.

In a scene that echoed the infamous Covid-19 press conference in which he proposed the insertion of ultraviolet tubes and bleach injections as potential cures to an incredulous and profusely sweating Dr Fauci, Trump described how the US planned to locate AI infrastructure technology in the US and exclude Chinese access. On this occasion Trump was reading from a prepared speech – not his natural style – while OpenAI’s Sam Altman looked on like a man forced to sign a false confession and Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s CEO, displayed the nervous fixed smile of a hostage. Only Oracle’s Larry Ellison, a longstanding supporter of Trump’s campaigns, looked at home with the required ring-kissing.

This strategy amounts to what the investment community calls a moat: an insurmountable obstacle created by a business to protect its market share from any potential competitor. However, as many entrepreneurs have learned, this concept can be more than a little problematic: taking advice from commercial advisors who, set to benefit whatever the outcome from their percentage-based commission, may not be the wisest idea. A moat can overburden any new venture with higher than necessary debt, it can lull a business into limiting research and development of their products, and cause resentment amongst its imprisoned customers by denying them choice. It’s a gangster move that might work if you are the sole supplier of drinking water to Flint, Michigan, but it’s unlikely to succeed in an international setting – especially with something as nascent as AI technology.

Much like the bleach and ultraviolet light cure for Covid, this attempt at the monopolisation of AI, grandly called “The Stargate Project” – a name taken from the title of a terrible 1990s sci-fi movie – has already failed at launch. Two days before the Trumpian mic drop and on the very day of his inauguration, a little-known Chinese AI company called DeepSeek released its open-source large-language model, R1. Many have already called it the ChatGPT killer. Its open-source codebase is completely transparent, and its scaled models are small enough that they can be downloaded to an average laptop and run offline. Independent engineering tests indicate that DeepSeek already matches or outperforms ChatGPT as well as Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini.

What has stunned the AI community is not just how good the DeepSeek model is – no doubt other models will emerge to outperform it – but how little it is said to have cost to develop. While OpenAI’s version was at least $1 billion, DeepSeek is believed to have cost a mere $5.6 million. DeepSeek took only three months to achieve what had taken pioneering companies like DeepMind and OpenAI a decade. DeepSeek’s cloud services costs are a fraction of ChatGPT. The worst news of all is that the Hangzhou-based company did all of this using an older generation of microprocessors after the Biden administration banned the export of the most advanced chips to China. No, Mr President, the race for AI isn’t over – it has barely begun.

The Broligarchy – tech dweebs flexing as tough guys – will learn soon enough that wading into the shark tank carrying offerings of fresh meat can rapidly put you on the menu. When the godfather eventually calls, he will surely make them an offer they won’t be able to refuse.

Masoud Golsorkhi